According to 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, the explorers Lewis and Clark were often entertained in the evenings by their native guides. The guides would set fire to sap-rich pine trees, and the party would sit back and watch them burn, sporadically exploding like a giant Roman candle.I don't know what that says about either Lewis and Clark or the guides.
Interestingly, no one seems to be completely sure why Roman candles are named as such. The OED ducks the issue slightly, claiming that it might be "probably after a parallel compound in another European language," but not making a definitive ruling. They do offer two additional comments, however; first, that it was perhaps a "reference to the transmission of the firework technique from China to Europe via the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire," and secondly that "it is possible that Roman candle originated in English and was semantically motivated by anti-Catholic feeling."
ETA: typo fixing. Alas.
Dude, it's "1491", not "1941." And no one else pointed this out?
ReplyDeleteAnd why the heck is it talking about Lewis and Clark?
Well, that's an embarassing typo.
ReplyDeletePart of the problem of investigating what the Americas were like before Columbus is that there wasn't anyone around who kept records. So a healthy chunk of the book is devoted to extrapolating backwards from the records we have of what the New World looked like to those who were seeing it for the first time. Lewis and Clark saw a lot of North America in a state fundamentally (although not completely) identical to the way it was before 1492, and they kept fairly detailed diaries.